User Reviews

Survivors recall the persecution, the transports, the camps, the lice, the ulcers, and the death. German school children conduct interviews -- their innocent, questioning eyes unable to hide their horror upon hearing the details of how a German government systematically sought to murder all the Jews and how ordinary citizens cooperated and enabled such cruelty. This film does not try to capture the scope of six million Jews murdered. Instead, it focuses on one family and what the few survivors experienced and observed. Little vignettes are heart-wrenching: like when the adult Inge recalls how -- as a child -- she had to say farewell to her fellow Jewish schoolchildren, knowing that they were being transported on trains from Stuttgart to "resettlement," but her family was allowed to stay because her father was a disabled war veteran. The film also contains horrifying documents: e.g., gestapo orders to appear at the train station, and newspaper articles extolling the removal of all Jews from a town. It makes you wonder how any German Jew could ever speak German again or visit Germany again or speak to any former friend. But they do. And I know how true this feeling is. My family lived in Karlsruhe only 75 miles from Goppingen, the city that is the subject of this film. My family was fortunate to escape Germany just before Kristallnacht. My aunt returned to Karlsruhe several times after the war and met with her childhood friend, a Christian. I accompanied her on one such trip. I met this wonderful friend and heard her describe the horror of being a Christian in Germany while the Nazis persecuted and deported the Jews. Her fear and her shame were obvious -- not unlike what was expressed by several of the Germans interviewed in this film. The telephone operator said that she will never forget the smell of the crematorium. And you get the impression that the German students listening to her will never forget their experience learning about it.